It is a sad day for conservatives. See the official National Review RIP for William F. Buckley, Jr. here.

I didn't agree with all the ideas that William F. Buckley, Jr. supported fervently. However, upon his death today, I found myself wondering what happened to the the conservatives that believe, as I do, in most of them? We can look back on the short primary season, that already seems over, and watch as conservative candidates never gained any traction (Duncan Hunter, Sam Brownback, Fred Thompson, etc.). Of our remaining candidates, John McCain (social moderate, economic moderate), Mike Huckabee (social conservative, economic mode/liberal), and Ron Paul (social liberal, economic conservative), Paul is the only traditional conservative focused on limited government intervention - his anti-war stance lost many republicans that want to "finish the job", regardless of their support for the war's premise. McCain seems to have been blessed with votes that noone had expected and is already being called the nominee by media. With the current political situations, I ask where are the conservatives? What are conservatives standing for?

Where are the conservatives?

I don't know. I posit that the social conservative with big government policies of the last 8 years have confused us.

Supposedly, most of the people who watch Fox News are conservatives, and most people who watch cable news are watching Fox News. I think this explains some of the McCain vote.

However, it also seems that the primary math for the RNC has lead to the great leads for McCain. With so many "winner-take-all" states, the close races don't even matter. I think I will explore this in another entry.

What are conservatives standing for?

I do not buy the definition of conservatism given by Richard Belzer last year in his series on the death of conservatism. (Note:link takes you to the Huffington Post.) Belzer writes that conservatives "operate from the fraudulent premise built around contempt for and control of the people." He seems to have in his mind (if you are able to read the articles) that conservatives are only concerned with obsessive military presence and harsh punishments.

I decided to start with wikipedia; the "Conservatism in the United States" entry begins, "Conservatism in the United States comprises a constellation of political ideologies including fiscal conservatism, free market or economic liberalism, social conservatism, libertarianism, bioconservatism and religious conservatism, as well as support for a strong military, small government, and states' rights." This broad lumping doesn't really help.

Wikipedia does have a nice Reagan quote on defining conservatism from Reason magazine in 1975, "If you analyze it I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is
libertarianism. I think conservatism is really a misnomer just as liberalism is a misnomer for the liberals -- if we were back in the
days of the Revolution, so-called conservatives today would be the
Liberals and the liberals would be the Tories. The basis of
conservatism is a desire for less government interference or less
centralized authority or more individual freedom and this is a pretty
general description also of what libertarianism is."

 
I also found several descriptions of conservatism being: yearning for the past (really that is nostalgia), desiring to prevent political process (perhaps with a technical definition of "conserve"), and several instances of definitions that slam religious people. None of these are really worth our time.

With the defiinitions so broad and woefully inadequate for my purposes, I am attempting to just write up some things that I think define conservatives. (I urge comments from conservatives who want to say what they stand for or don't. Non-conservatives, your views are useful, too - after all this is CJ.)

Here is my list. Conservatives...

1. prefer limited national government,

2. prefer local government control when government needs to step in,

3. are not interested in what people are doing as long as it doesn't impede others rights,

4. believe in personal charity, and

5. are still upset over the 1913 decisions to create the Fed AND the income tax.

With your input, this could become a useful list.